Harassment of accused persons in criminal cases is incredible. They have to keep on appearing in courts again and again after signing a bond for their continued appearance. The proceedings keep on getting adjourned again and again for different reasons. Is this at all required under the procedure laid down in the code of criminal procedure? Most certainly not.

The CrPC permits an accused person to be represented by a lawyer of his choice. The code also permits the court to exempt the personal appearance of an accused represented by a lawyer. The Supreme Court has held that even for framing charges against an accused, his presence is not required and the lawyer’s presence is enough. The code provides that if the personal attendance of an accused is required on a particular date, like for his identification, the court can pass an order to require such personal attendance on that specific date. In summons cases, Sec 317 also permits the questioning of the accused being dispensed with.

Thus an entire trial can be completed without requiring the presence of an accused on a single date. In fact it is only the lawyer who plays a role in the proceedings and the accused remains just a spectator.

The question needs to be asked as to why, in such situations, the magistrates insist on the personal presence of all accused persons on every date and get bonds signed by the accused persons with or without sureties for their appearance on every date.

It is true that this practice is in the interest of the members of the bar, like me, because when the accused has to personally come on every date, he is bound to bring fee every time.

One consequence of this practice is that each magistrate has to waste several hours of his time every day in deciding applications for exemption from appearance of a particular accused on a specific date for special reasons to be shown in an application. On the grant of such exemption, the matter gets adjourned to some other date. If an accused, in spite of the bond does not turn up on a particular date, the court has to issue a non bailable warrant for his arrest and production apart from initiating proceedings for the forfeiture of the bail amount. If an accused happens to be in jail and not on bail, the magistrate has to issue a production warrant and the jail staff has to bring the accused to the court.

All this is totally unnecessary and the Bombay High Court has delivered a judgment giving a direction to all subordinate courts to exempt the personal appearance of all accused persons in all criminal cases. If however the personal presence of any particular accused is required on a specific date for a specific purposes the court can always make an order requiring a particular accused person to appear in person on a specific date. I am sure that this one simple directive must have doubled the disposal of cases by each magistrate. What is, however, even more important is that the accused persons will be saved from the immense harassment of having to appear before the courts again and again. Their trauma of Tareekh pe Tareekh [date after date] will be a thing of the past.

If Arvind Kejriwal’s decision not to execute a bond for appearance and to go to jail instead secures a general directive from the supreme court to all criminal courts in the country on the lines of the directive given by the Bombay high court, it will bring enormous relief to millions of accused persons in the country. Then Arvind Kejriwal's stay in jail will not be in vain.

Even though Sec 88 of CrPC give a discretion to the magistrate to require or not to require the execution of a bond by accused persons, few magistrates are willing to exercise this discretion. Some magistrates do not even understand that it is Sec 88 which applies to such situations and not Sec 436, which applies only to an arrested person who applies for his release by furnishing a bail bond.

Former law minister Shanti Bhushan is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court

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Thank you to all those who have taken the trouble to read the article and share their thoughts. Out of the arguments made here, there are two that perhaps need answering. So here they go.

1. The first part of the article compares outcomes (relative percentages of population of the religions concerned) irrespective of the process that led to those outcomes - whether immigration, relatively faster population growth or conversions. This was for two reasons. One, to put the figure of 2.3 per cent in "numerical perspective", as the article itself explained. The second reason was that outcomes are ultimately what the crux of debate is about. The rest of the article in any case dealt with process - or conversions in this case, from both a contemporary and historical perspective.

2. Some commenters have tried to cast doubts on the reliability of Census 2001. Those who do this should bear in mind that Census 2001 was conducted by a BJP government. Considering the extreme importance that BJP gives to this issue, it would be reasonable to expect that IF it had perceived a problem with the methodology that was distorting the numbers, it would have fixed it. As the article mentioned, BJP or BJP-supported governments have been in power for 10 of the last 40 years, or about a quarter of the time, and the only reasonable conclusion one can arrive at is that any misreporting of numbers, real or perceived, would be marginal and hence, not of importance.

To all other arguments made, my answer is the following: Please read the article again, with particular focus on the quotations of Vivekananda and Monier Williams, and the history of the missionary efforts in Bengal and their outcome.

#11 Bonita: they all require political capital and energy. To change things requires a lot of energy in India and you have to choose your causes. What Pratap Bhanu Mehta says might appeal to a narrow NGO sector. Lets face it - Sedition / Armed Forces special powers act etc will not be dismantled. The country's conditions don't permit it. This is a vast poorly administered country and that won't change in a hurry. Hate speech is perhaps a good won to be repealed but it won't for the same reasons ----------- You can spend all your time repealing these laws but you will lose the next election. Is getting an approving editorial in the New York Time worth that? These upper class johallowallahs will simply move on.

I'm just saying its not a priority - the priority should be to dismantle the licence permit legal jungle, like labour law reform.

Surely these tasks can proceed in parallel, rather than serially. Labour laws are under the purview of the ministry of labour. Sedition and hate speech under the Home Ministry, Sec 66A under telecommunications.

9/D-33 Bonita: I don't disagree with anything he says. I'm just saying its not a priority - the priority should be to dismantle the licence permit legal jungle, like labour law reform. Without doing that, the promise of a Modi government or any government will run into sand. Its the biggest impediment to investment and jobs - but these things don't seem to worry our middle class intellectuals

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes a lot of irrelevant stuff. That's the problem with the Delhi intellectuals. What we need now is labour law reform. That is the urgent need of the hour. He many not understand this because all his friends have jobs and their children get jobs easily

Maybe he does. That doesn't mean he is wrong in this instance. Laws and instruments of state (CBI, ED etc) are good when one is at the giving end and deplorable when one is at the other. Let those who argue that it is acceptable to mock one religion say it is acceptable to mock all in the name of freedom of expression. Let us scrap this rubbish about "hurting the sentiments of a community" whichever be that community. If you are offended by a book, don't read it. If you are offended by a movie, don't watch it and tell your friends to keep away. Violent protests and threats of disturbance of law and order should be crushed with an iron fist.

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